Ripple's former CTO Stefan Thomas is going up against Ethereum with the launch of a new smart contracts platform.

Well, "new" isn't quite right – the platform Thomas released implementations for today is Codius, an open-source project that Ripple released in beta in 2014 but shelved the following year. Now, though, having announced his departure from Ripple in May, Thomas is re-launching Codius as the technical backbone for his new company, Coil.

Using Codius, Coil aims to change the way websites monetize their content.

According to Thomas, monetizing web content has so far relied on clunky "workarounds" like ads, paywalls and user data harvesting (think Facebook's recent debacle). But his new project, by using Interledger, an open-source protocol that was developed inside Ripple for sending payments across different ledgers, plans to allow users' browsers to make micropayments to websites they visit.

Codius could enable use cases such as a "revenue disbursement contract," which could take in revenue as people watch a movie and pay that money out to all the parties that made the movie – and not in batch payments, but little by little. Or a Codius smart contract could help news outlets and their readers interact in that it could manage readers' authorizations and subscriptions "and act as a sort of switching board for your money," Thomas said.